POS1041 Study Guide Subjects from The Logic Chapter 6 Congress Importance of the drawing of district lines gerrymandering o Federal law apportions House seats among states after each census but states draw lines for districts Wesberry v Sanders 1964 districts must have equal population Thornburg v Gingles 1986 district lines may not dilute minority representation nor drawn with race as the predominant consideration o If one party controls both the legislature and the governorship it may attempt to draw district lines that favor its own candidates Idea is to concentrate the opposition party s voters in a small number of districts that the party wins by large margins thus wasting many of its votes while creating as many districts as possible where one s own party has a secure majority Gerrymandering drawing legislative districts in such a way as to give one political party a disproportionately large share of seats for the share of votes its candidates win Davis v Bandemer 1986 Supreme Court held that a gerrymander would be unconstitutional if it were too strongly biased against a party s candidates but as yet no districting scheme has run afoul of this vague standard Candidate Centered Campaigns o 19th century system was predominantly party centered Party line voting was prevalent voters based choices on the top of the ticket the presidential candidates in presidential election years and on the parties platforms Congressional candidates fates were decided by national trends that were not easily controlled by the candidates o 20th century changes in laws regulating elections and parties weakened parties and encouraged ticket splitting voting for candidates of different parties for different offices Most important changes introduction of primary elections for choosing the parties nominees and the secret ballot Party ties weaken due to fractured New Deal policies and divisive new issues civil rights the Vietnam War abortion the environment o As party ties weakened a more candidate centered electoral process emerged Decline in party loyalty offered incumbents a chance to win votes that once would have gone routinely to the other party s candidate Expand electoral base by emphasizing individual character legislative performance and constituency services encouraging voters to use such criteria in deciding how to vote Candidate centered works to help incumbents because incumbents felt more inclined to build a personal following within their state and respective districts by offering greater resources for constituencies o Recent years past 2 decades emergence of a more nationalized party centered electoral process contributes directly to the increase in the partisan and ideological polarization in the House and Senate for it has given the congressional parties much more distinctly partisan electoral constituencies How does work get done in Congress what factors facilitate Congress getting work done The Parties Majorities not only enact bills but also set rules establish procedures choose leaders and decide how to organize their respective houses o Incentive to join and maintain durable coalitions political parties What individual members give up in freedom to go their own way is more than made up for by what they can gain by cooperating with one another Political parties are formed when people recognize it is in their best interests to cooperate despite their disagreements Development of Congressional Parties o Parties began to form in the first session of the First Congress o When the House and Senate divided into parties congressional and party leadership merged Formal leadership established more quickly in the House b c collective action problems were more acute Speaker of the House the majority s leader and agent who could appoint committees make rules and manage the legislative process Speaker of the House o Thomas Brackett Czar Reed R Maine Centralized authority reached its peak under Reed Served as SotH in the 51st 54th and 55th Congresses Appointed all committees and chairs exercised unlimited power of recognition and imposed new rules that made it much more difficult for a minority ro prevent action through procedural delays Chaired the Ruled Committee which controlled the flow of legislation from the other committees to the floor of the house Republican party willing to delegate power to Reed because 1 Disagreements within the Republican Party were at the time muted o No important faction thought its interests could be threatened by a powerful leader allied with a competing faction 2 Service in the House had not yet become a career the average member only served 2 terms Once the above conditions no longer held the House revolted Republican Speaker Joseph Cannon of Illinois 1903 1911 made the mistake of offending the progressive faction of the Republican Party that had emerged since Reed o 1910 Republican insurgents formed an alliance with Democrats who voted to strip the Speaker of his power to appoint committees and chairs forced him off the Rules Committee and limited his power of recognition Increasingly career oriented membership filled the power vacuum with a more decentralized and impersonal leadership structure making seniority the criterion for selecting committee chairs By weakening the Speaker the House members in effect chose to tolerate higher transaction costs to reduce their conformity costs The degree of consensus within a party continues to affect how much authority party members are willing to delegate to party leaders Democrats 2 Republicans o In the 1970s Democrats strengthened the hand of the Speaker and curbed the independence of committee chairs by making them subject to election by secret ballot in the Democratic Caucus Party grew more cohesive as conservative southern wing shrank so members saw less conformity costs in centralizing o Unified by the party s Contract with America House Republicans made Newt Gingrich the most powerful Speaker since Cannon o House Republicans gave their leader an unusually strong hand to overcome their coordination and other collective action problems because they believed that keeping their promise to act on every item in the Contract with America was crucial to their and their party s electoral fates Congress is subject to conditional party government Conditional party government the degree of authority delegates to and exercised by congressional party leaders varies with is conditioned by the extent of election driven
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